KENT, Ohio - A large crowd gathered just after 11 p.m. Saturday behind the Taylor Hall at Kent State University to honor the fallen. The crowd stood near the Victory Bell holding candles in remembrance of May 4th, 1970.

It was 44 years ago that four students were killed after 67 shots were fired in 13 seconds by the National Guard.

The students were pushed over to the parking lot of Prentice Hall as they were protesting the Vietnam War.

Students and volunteers are still standing in the parking lot area where the four students died. The students will stand there for 12 hours honoring the victims in the very spot where they were shot and killed.

Around 7 p.m. Saturday, a forum was held where survivors answered questions and spoke about the day they will never forget.

"To me, May 4th means life, but it also means death and murder," said Dean Kahler, who was shot and will never walk again.

University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban is a Kent State Alumnus and was a student there when this happened. He tells the story that he would have been in the vicinity of the shootings, but a friend asked him to have lunch so that delayed his movement about the campus that day.

Even college students in the 1970s were smart enough to never again bring rocks to a gunfight! After a decade of litigation State AGs learned never allow the National Guard to get involved with “campus riots” / panty raids / ROTC building arson / etc. Also that was a lesson to the National Guard to be allow itself to be used by politicians in Race Riots.

I also suspect that this was a set-up. Radical anti-Vietnam protestors were popping up at colleges all over the place, and no one knew how to handle it. Classes were disrupted. Some colleges were shut down for lengthy periods of time (Columbia, for instance). At the uptown campus of NYU, where I was teaching, someone set fire to the library.

We’ll never know for sure exactly what happened. But the National Guard Troops really were unready to deal with these potentially violent protestors. I think they were frightened by the prospect of Molotov cocktails being thrown at them, or something similar.

Of course, it was very unfortunate. The left made instant use of it as a propaganda tool, and one could say that it led eventually to our losing the Vietnam War—not because our troops couldn’t have won it, but because the politicians lost heart and gave up.

Now, after Ruby Ridge, Waco and the all too common SWAT team forced entries and shootings throughout the nation, it seems like a quaint notion that government authorities should not run wild, shooting and killing innocent civilians without due process.

Yet, in the prevailing Police State climate, government entities claim the right to do so and for the most part the courts agree with them.

I think the protests were already dying down. The first draft lottery was held December 1, 1969, and that informed a large number of students (including Slick Willie) of the probability whether they might be drafted.

1968 was the worst year of all for protests (and assassinations), and things began to settle some after that year. Nixon took office January of 1969 and began to reduce the number of US ground troops eary in his first term.

The fewer who had any reason to fear the draft, the fewer the protests and demonstrations.

These “students” were not protesting the Vietnam war; they had firebombed the ROTC building, had doused trees in gasoline and caught them on fire, basically terrorized the town residence for weeks and, at the time of the shootings, were throwing bricks and other debris at guardsmen, chanting “kill! Kill! Kill!”

The guardsmen were justified in their very restrained response.

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posted on 05/04/2014 8:12:15 PM PDT
by fwdude
( You cannot compromise with that which you must defeat.)

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